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In my last post, I reviewed a handful of ejournal platforms (and one ebook platform) to see what default options were available that affected whether the search results would show all content or only the content the library had licensed or purchased. I also wanted to see which platforms let the user change the settings for available content. There were some platforms that I think did this the right way by letting the subscribing library choose what the default search mode would be and by also giving users the option to override that default at the search page and on the results pages. Only JSTOR and Project MUSE offer this kind of flexibility. At the other end of the spectrum of flexibility and usability were platforms where neither the library nor the user could change the default settings that were set to show all content (Wiley Online Library is like that).

There are a range of platforms in the middle where the user can change the search mode to include only licensed content. A few vendors like this have communicated by various means (on posts in the ERIL mailing list or in support tickets back to me) that users tell them they want to see all the content or that some subscribing libraries prefer it to be that way. I find it a bit galling that some vendors disdain letting their customers choose what’s best for their own community (i.e., letting the subscribing library make that decision about search defaults based on what is known about the users in that community). User preferences at a large research institution (especially the preferences of the faculty and graduate students) are unlikely to be same as those of students at a community college or a small 4-year school. If anyone is going to have an understanding of those local user preferences, it’s going to be the subscribing library, not the vendor.

It’s worth taking a moment to consider the pros and cons for making all the content visible on these platforms. If the default setting shows users everything, they can avail themselves of the link resolver in the interface to track down full text (on the off chance the library has it elsewhere). If the link resolver fails to find the full text elsewhere, it should present the user with an interlibrary loan option, which would likely satisfy many users (except those who are in too much of a rush or can’t be bothered with the process). On the other hand, link resolvers can be unreliable and fail to lead users to content that the library may actually have. Furthermore, some platforms won’t even let you integrate your link resolver into the interface or they way that they let you do that is poorly done. In the article record view on some platforms, the link resolver button or link is minimized at the expense of the publisher’s own set of buttons and options to purchase the article (one can wonder about the intentions of vendors in making some of these design decisions that prioritize purchase options). No librarian is happy when a reference interaction starts off with the user saying, “I found an article on your database and now it’s asking me to pay $55 for it.”

At this point, some of you may be wondering why I’m making such a big deal out of platforms that most users only find themselves on temporarily. Users will find a record for the article in a discovery service or in an aggregator database and then wind up on the ejournal platform after a series of clicks on a link resolver (or a direct link if they’re lucky). After the user has found the full text and acted on it (read it, downloaded it, decided it wasn’t worth bothering with, etc.), they are more likely to go back to the discovery service or the aggregator database to continue their searching. It is far less likely that a user who has gone that last mile to get to the full text would then start new searches there.

With respect to the array of database options that an academic library can display on their website via an A-Z databases page, it is not uncommon for that library to skip listing all of the ejournal platforms, especially if the number of journals they actually have on a given platform is small (ejournal holding are likely to be accessible via A-Z journals pages, link resolvers, and catalog records). So it’s not like the users are going directly to these ejournal platforms in droves to begin the search process (some exceptions to this are JSTOR and ScienceDirect, which are well known by users and commonly featured on A-Z database lists on the library website).

Despite the fact that our users may not be spending that much time on these ejournal platforms, let alone consciously deciding to go there after viewing a list of database options on a A-Z list, these platforms really should offer more customization to the user and to the subscribing library.

Depending on the interface and system you’re talking about and depending on the user type you’re talking about (the casual searcher who needs just one or two sources quickly or the dogged searcher who needs an expansive search set), it’s an interesting question about how to handle default search options that control whether results show all possible results or just those your library has immediate access to (via subscriptions and purchases). In time that I’ve been a librarian (since 1999), academic libraries typically offer their users:

a catalog that only shows the library’s collections (or maybe a union collection where materials can easily be requested and quickly delivered)

A&I databases that rely on link resolvers to get to full text where possible and ILL services where access is not available

aggregator databases that pull together full text content from lots of different publishers and may also include records where only abstracts are available

ejournal collections from various publishers where all or part of the collection has been subscribed to or purchased

Added to that mix are discovery services that try to bring together records from the catalog and records for articles that the library has full text access to. Commonly, those discovery services will also let the user change the search mode to find article records for which the library has no full-text access. In most cases, libraries can go into administrative options for their discovery services and aggregator databases and set default search settings that control whether search results show all content or just the content the user has full-text access to. Typically, the search interfaces give the user a way to override the defaults at the search box (sometimes at the basic search box, more often only at the advanced search box) or on the search results pages.

The search systems used by ejournal collections, though, seem to offer libraries and their users far less control over default search setting or the ability to refine search to only available content. In this post, I want to review some of the ejournal platforms (and some ebook platforms) we have at Baruch College and spotlight the ones that give librarians who administer these systems and searchers who use them a measure of control over what should appear in the search results.

Cambridge Core

Admin options: Subscribing libraries have no way in the admin options or by submission of a support request to change the default search to show only results for available content.

User options: Checkbox main search page to limit to “Only content I have access to.” Same checkbox also shown at top of facets on search results pages.

Cambridge Core search screen showing checkbox

Emerald Insight

Admin options: No way to change default search behavior.

User options: Only the advanced search page and the search results pages offer a way to “Include” “only content I have access to.”

Emerald Insight advanced search screen showing “Include” option

JSTOR

Admin options: I don’t recall how we set this up (maybe via a support ticket) but we were able to set defaults to only show available content.

Admin options: There isn’t a way in the admin options or by means of a support request to change the default, which shows all content.

User options: The search results page is the only way to change from the default of showing all content to just the “unlocked” content.

Oxford Handbooks Online search results page with availability options

Oxford Journals

Admin options: There isn’t a way in the admin options or by means of a support request to change the default, which shows all content.

User options: No way to just see content the library has.

Oxford Reference

Admin options: Same interface as Oxford Handbooks Online (but different URL). By default, search results limited “By Availability” to “Unlocked” and “Free” content. I don’t know how this get set up (it’s not an admin option).

User options: The search results page is the only way to change from the default of showing all content to just the “unlocked” content.

I’ve been wondering about the pros and cons of having a search results page that lets the user select all the items on the page (so they can be saved, exported, etc.) A quick survey of some major database platforms, discovery services, and our catalog shows that this feature is not available in every interface:

Interfaces that have it:

EBSCOhost

Factiva

LexisNexis Academic

Primo (current UI)

ProQuest

Web of Science

Interfaces that don’t have it:

Ex Libris Aleph

EBSCOhost

JSTOR

Gale

Primo (including new UI)

ScienceDirect

Summon

I’m not sure if this is necessarily a bad thing for an interface to be missing the “select all items” function. I suspect that usage of this feature might vary by tool (article databases vs. discovery layers vs. traditional catalog interfaces). Should we be clamoring for this function across all tools? Some of them? None of them? Is it too much of an expert searcher tool to bother with (or to bother with in some tools?)

I realize that to answer these questions conclusively would require access to usage data we don’t necessarily have (how many users clicked on the feature in the interfaces where it’s an option) and observational data (from interviews, usability testing, etc.). I’m curious about what others think about this feature.

UPDATE 12 October 2016: Thanks to folks on the Primo mailing list, I realized I was wrong about Primo not offering the feature. The current UI does but the new one doesn’t. A librarian on the ERIL list pointed out that EBSCOhost lets you add all items on the page if you first go to the “Share” button. I’ve updated the post to reflect these corrections.

On Twitter recently, I was asked for advice about setting up a new one-person UX shop in a library. I’ve only recently emerged from the UX-shop-of-one world, thanks to the addition of a part-time UX designer to my “team” and am not entirely sure how much my experience yields universal insights. So consider the following caveats about how institutional differences will affect the usefulness of any thoughts I have about how to get started.

How many people work in your library? Size of the library staff matters. If you are one of dozen or less people staffing the library, then your UX work is likely bundled in with other job responsibilities. Some libraries are large enough to support a whole unit or division devoted to UX (or at least web services, web oversight, etc.)

How directly can you make changes to the website (and its attendant ecosystem services and resources, such as the link resolver, the discovery layer, subscription databases, catalog records, proxy server, ejournals knowledgebase, etc.) or to physical locations in the library where you want to work your magic?

What is the culture of change in your library? Do proposed changes and new initiatives tend to get debated to death? Does everyone have to weigh in on decisions?

With those considerations, here are some suggestions for someone just getting started as the sole person with UX responsibilities (or a UX job title).

Find your tribe inside and outside the library. In the library, look for people who are open to user-centered services or user-centered design so that you can have someone to bounce ideas off of. If that person happens to run a service or manage a resource that you’d like to do some design work on, all the better. Outside the library, you’ll want to find communities of people in libraryland who are interested in talking about UX work and communities that serve a broader UX professional audience. For me, this includes:

Dive into “the literature” (I’ll only mention a few books, as there are dozens worth reading)

Useful, Usable, Desirable. A great book about UX in libraries by Aaron Schmidt and Amanda Etches to get started with. Especially useful is the way the book is organized to help you assess all aspects of your library to help you identify where you might want to begin your design work.

LibUX. Check out the archives of this podcast and make sure you subscribe to it.

Carefully gather evidence from user research and save it in a mindful fashion as you work on projects. It is essential to draw on this evidence when making formal proposals for some change you’d like to make. The more you can show your colleagues that design decisions can be driven by evidence and not whim, the more likely they’ll listen to you.

Do usability tests on existing systems and services to identify and properly document problems.

Learn as much as you can about project management, as a lot of UX design work is a multi-step process that usually involves your collaboration with colleagues who may not always see the big picture of the project.

Last fall, I was given the OK to hire a part-time user experience designer, which meant that my library’s user experience team was no longer a one-person operation. For the past four years, I’ve been working mostly on my own, although I frequently did projects that paired me up with others in the library (such as the time I worked with the head of access services to set up our new online reservation system for group study rooms).

One of the issues I’ve been working through over the past four months since I gained a part-time colleague is communication. Since it is no longer just me here, I need to be more intentional in sharing information. Although there are services to help you with project management in a team setting–things like Asana and Trello–I’ve found so far that a more low-key technology seems to be pretty good far: an internal wiki.

I’ve been using our campus’ wiki system from Confluence for many years now and feel pretty comfortable creating a new space there for the UX work my colleague and I are engaged in. In case it is useful to anyone else, I’ll share the set up.

First, there is a main page that lists all the projects in the pipeline. The project list is organized into high, medium, and low priority groups. Each project gets its own page. Each project page has these sections:

The Problem. A quick statement of what problem we are trying to solve with our UX design approach. For example, on the project page for “Databases by Subject,” the problem is that the current page requires too much scrolling.

Research Questions. As we start to dig into each project, we try our best to consider what it is we really don’t know but probably should if we hope to do the project in a way that aligns closely with user expectations. We want to make sure that we are questioning as many of our assumptions as possible. These questions will guide our efforts to understand our users before we get to the stage of producing high fidelity mockups. With the “Databases by Subject” page, the questions we have include things like:

Which is better for users: an alphabetical list of subjects or chunking the subjects within broad categories?

If we do use categories, what are the best category labels?\

If we do use categories, should we still have an A-Z drop down menu on the page that simply lists databases by name?

Design Ideas. At all stages of the project, we’re finding we have lots of ideas, both big and small, that may help us when we get to the mockup stage. This is a place to quickly note those. For some projects where it’s likely there is more than one distinct direction to go in, we’ll have a subsection of “General Design Principles” that apply to different options and a subsection for each specific option. For example, we are working on a redesign of the central search box on our home page. We’ve got a general principles subsection to specify things we should include and we’ve got subsections for the two main design options we have: a box with a drop down menu or a box with tabs on top.

Milestones. This is a list of the main tasks we’ll need to accomplish. In Confluence, these can be styled as a proper to-do list, which I like because of the satisfaction I get from ticking off a check box once some milestone has been reach. I probably need to read up more on project management techniques to see if it makes sense to break this section out from the Project Timeline section that we also create.

Project Timeline. This helps me get a rough sense of the flow of the project and think about how the deadlines align with the academic calendar, which is important as some changes we’d like to make are so major they really shouldn’t go live until the end the semester.

Project Documents and Files. We’ve been using a shared Google Drive for mockups, usability test recordings, screenshots of other websites, etc. It’s easier to use Google Drive for this than to go to the trouble of uploading it all to the Confluence wiki.

Sources of Evidence Used. This lists the evidence of user behavior that we will use throughout the design process. For a project we’re doing now to redesign the central search box on the library’s home page, the list includes Google Analytics event tracking data on use of the tabs on the existing search box; usability tests; and query log analysis. The items on the list may link to a new page just about that item if it is a big enough thing. That’s the case with usability tests, which are usually big enough endeavors to merit their own pages in the wiki; so, for example, we have a page just about the details of the initial usability test run last December on the central search box.

I’m hoping all of this project management work will help me when the time comes to make the case to various stakeholders in the library about the design change I’d like to make. Depending on the scope of the change being suggested, I may need to write a report detailing the research that went into the recommended design.

This system of using a wiki for project management has really helped us organize the work better. I suspect, though, that the “to do” aspects of it need some more work. I’d rather not use a separate system to manage that and hope to figure out more ways to use Confluence (for example, I haven’t taken advantage yet of the ability to tag people in Confluence with an @ symbol to assign them tasks). For now, though, I feel like we’re in a better place with this kind of shared documentation.

In the past month, I haven’t really made any effort to archive my posts on the soon-to-be-gone FriendFeed. Instead I’ve been focused on lending a hand in finding a new home for my go-to place for professional support, advice, and gossip: the Library Society of the World (LSW). Yesterday, some of us helped launch an instance of the open-source forum software, Discourse, on a server administered by a few folks long part of the LSW community. Our online barn raising has been a whirlwind of great ideas, debate about needed functionality, and worry about features in FriendFeed that can’t be replicated on the new platform. You can check out our work so far, and, even better, sign up now and join in.

Today, I took a breather from the discussions about how to make Discourse more useful and fun for the LSW community and decided to click back in time through page after page of my FriendFeed posts. I may yet archive all my posts in the remaining hours. But for now, I’d like to use this post to offer a few snapshots, and document my time at FriendFeed. I joined FriendFeed on April 8, 2008, with no clue that seven years and one day later, FriendFeed would be gone. Some anniversary.

Here’s my first real post on FriendFeed, which is from May 16, 2007:

At the time, I was busy planning with Steven Kaye and Rachel Watstein an unconference, Library Camp NYC, which was held at the college where I worked and remains one of my favorite things I’ve done in fifteen years as a librarian.

Although I often started conversation topics and commented on lots of others, I was equally enamored of the way that you could plug in various other web services you used and have your activity elsewhere be documented/shared in FriendFeed (Flickr images that you favorited, blog posts and tweets that you wrote, etc.) Over the years, I had hooked up dozens of different services (many of which went defunct or stopped being things I actively used). Here’s a screenshot of the services I had connected as of today:

One thing that gave me great pleasure was the way an article or blog post that I’d read and automatically shared in FriendFeed (via the feed of read items from my Google Reader account and then later via my feed from my commonplace book on Tumblr) would then launch a threaded discussion related to the item shared. It happened again and again, and showed me the power of being able to write things once but publish them multiply for greater network effects.

I would say that among the people I interacted with on FriendFeed, I was moderately active, not the most active commenter but also rarely a lurker. This screenshot take today shows how many comments I’d made and how many people I was subscribed to:

There have been many wonderful blog posts in the past few weeks from FriendFeed fans about what they got out of the site (and a really nice analysis of and commentary on those posts in Walt Crawford‘s May 2015 issue of Cites and Insights). Since so many wonderful things have already been said, I’ll just say thanks to all my good friends there and hope I find them elsewhere online in the days and years to come.

This week, I’ve been helping the head of collection management at my library figure out if we can make a change in the way we make our ebook collections discoverable. For many years, when we’ve bought ebook packages, we would go to the vendors website, download the MARC records, tweak them a bit in MarcEdit, and then get them uploaded into our catalog so they could be found along with our print book collections. Now that we have a new discovery service–Primo–we’re wondering if we can just activate those collections in the Primo Central Index. If we go that route, then we will no longer have to manually process all those ebook records in MARC.

I’ve been looking into each of the ebook packages we have and then checking the following in the Primo (and SFX) documentation:

is the package something that Primo/SFX has indexed

if the package is indexed, can you search not only by subjects and keywords but also the full text of those books

Regarding the first question, it’s interesting but not at all surprising that some ebook collections we get aren’t indexed by Primo/SFX. Examples include Oxford Handbooks Online and EBSCO’s Ebook Collection (that last one should surprise no one). I also don’t know how we’ll handle a PDA collection like the one we have from MyIlibary. It doesn’t seem like we’ll be able to stop all manual uploads of records into the catalog yet, but we might be able to give up doing it for a few. It’d be nice if we could switch over wholly to a new workflow, but I guess as in many other arenas we have to learn to straddle the new and the legacy systems.

This year, I hope to embark on a series of interrelated projects that will help me better understand how students at the college where I work understand search with respect to online systems. I’ve got some very practical and pressing needs that this research connects to; specifically, I want to do some design work on the main search box on our library website:

While I could just do some rounds of usability testing, I think I want to dig deeper given that the stakes seem to be so high here. The search boxes connect up to many different resources that taken together represent major investments from our budget and our staff’s time. I do intend to do some testing, but I’m also thinking about analyzing query logs, surveying students, and conducting interviews or focus groups. I hope that out of this work, I’ll find some generalizable results worth publishing.

To see this problem from various perspectives, I’ve started doing some reading, looking for texts that will serve as method sources in any publications I produce. I’ve started reading works by Carol Kuhlthau to learn more about the information seeking process model she identified. Her model seems like an essential one that will ground my observation and analysis.

Another area where I’ve started doing some reading is social informatics. As it turns out, I’ll be teaching the library’s 3-credit course in social informatics this fall and need to get up to speed fast, as it will be the first time I’ve taught the class. I’m hoping that the work of Robert Kling and others will give me a broader perspective on how students conceive of search in a world characterized by rapid changes in information communication technologies. In his 1999 article, “What Is Social Informatics and Why Does It Matter,” Kling defines social informatics as “the interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.” While web design typically takes into account common affordances from the web that you can assume your users are familiar with, I think I want to look more broadly at how students’ conception of “search” is shaped by the institutional context of being a CUNY student and the cultural contexts of search (e.g., what aspects of culture connect up with how they conceive of and typically use search systems).

I hope my readers here will indulge me a bit as I use this blog as a space to try out some of these ideas I’d like to bring into my analysis.

Subjects reflect an inherently passive role in a research project. Researchers administer questionnaires that are designed by the research. They analyze results.

They do lots of things that confirm the expertise of the researcher. But, in reality, subjects are the experts. They have the knowledge that we want to understand and use. The question that researchers and designers need to ask themselves is, “How do we find out what they know?” It’s as much an attitude towards research and people. It has implications for how we define our research goals.

The interviewer, Whitney Quesenbery, then suggests to Harris that “it sounds like a big shift in your attitude about your research” from a position of ‘I am the person in the white coat studying things’ to ‘I’m engaging with people as I work with them.’” As someone who has done a lot usability testing, I find the mindset that Harris advocates compelling. So how do I think this might change my approach to designing research projects?

For one thing, I think remembering that the participant is an expert keeps my hubris in check. It’s easy for me to get carried away in thinking I’m the expert, I’m the person who knows this and that about user behavior and best practices, etc. But if I was such an expert, then I wouldn’t really need to do much testing. I’d already know everything I need to know.

My users are the experts, and it is up to me to continually be going back to them to understand how they use our systems. Yes, as a librarian, I know that there are more efficient ways of doing things in our systems and that sometimes there are even ways of doing thing that are objectively “right.. But that really doesn’t matter to me so much as a UX researcher. I’m not a user of our systems in the same way our primary audience is, or if I am, I’m a very special case (as are all of my fellow librarians). The “experts” at using our systems are the people these systems are primarily designed for (at my library, that would be the students and faculty of the college where I work). These experts are using our systems in their own way, not necessarily the way a librarian would (but that doesn’t matter). My job is to consider them as experts and then try to understand how they approach our systems, how they interact with them, what mental models they have in mind as they use our systems.

Keeping this perspective–that our users are our “experts” that we need to learn from and understand–will prevent me from designing research questions for projects that are flawed because I’ve fooled myself into thinking that I already “know” what I’m going to find. When it comes to analyzing usability tests, this perspective can help me maintain a more open mind about what I’m seeing.

And, finally, I think it will allow me to be more open to design suggestions from our experts. We should be fitting our systems when possible to their way of doing things, not strictly our preconceived models of what’s best for them. This last point speaks to what Harris was getting at when she mentioned that “subjects reflect an inherently passive role in a research project.” Later in the interview she talks about “participatory action research” as a method whereby the people being studied can play an active role in developing the research agenda, in analyzing the results, or designing solutions. I’m going to have think about that some more to see if there’s a way to bring that kind of collaboration into the UX design work I’d like to pursue. Stay tuned.

This year, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about search boxes on library home pages. I’m gearing up to present a plan for redoing the one at my library in the next year and have spent a lot of time looking at how other libraries have solved this design problem (I’ve also been looking closely at search on lots of commercial websites, such as Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, etc.). One thing I would love to test with users is whether you can get away with “____ and more” as a search scope label.

Many library sites let you focus your search to the catalog, the e-journal lookup system, a discovery layer, the library site search, etc., and label them with some name that identifies the kind of search tool it is: Library Catalog, Site Search, A-Z Journals, etc. Other libraries go the route of deprecating the name of the tool and instead focus on labels that identify the format of information to be found with that search scope: books, media, articles, journals, etc.

When libraries label the search scope by the format of what can be found there, they find that a single format label may not always accurately identify what you can find there. So instead of a label for “Books,” which searches the library catalog and will actually yield records for journals, DVDs, etc., it’s common for libraries to use the label “Books and more.” Often, you’ll see clusters of the “________ and more” labels on one site:

Books and more

Articles and more

Sometimes you’ll find that the label still uses the tool name (e.g., “Library Catalog”) and offers in smaller letters explanatory text (e.g., “books and more.”)

I’d be willing to wager that if you were to ask your users what they think might be included in the “more” category, you’d be let down by their wild, very off-base guesses. This is of course a testable claim I’m making. I don’t know if anyone’s written up anything about this very question of “what does and more mean to you” but would love to read it if it’s out there. Until I find such evidence or do my own testing, consider me skeptical about the value of “____ and more” as a link label or explanatory text.